Books

Do identical twins get the same teeth at the same time? Do they feel each other’s pain? Should they be placed in the same classroom or separated? Should they dress alike? Should they get the same gifts on birthdays and holidays? Are identical twins hereditary? Are their fingerprints alike? When the hospital pediatrician told Lori Duffy Foster her twins were identical, her mind started reeling. She is a journalist and curiosity is in her nature. So she started a blog to record observations of her own twins as they grew, and to provide other parents of identical twins and their relatives with answers to questions they wouldn’t find anywhere else. That blog became this book. RAISING IDENTICAL TWINS: THE UNIQUE CHALLENGES AND JOYS OF THE EARLY YEARS takes readers on a journey from the birth of her twins through their sixth birthday, and is peppered with fascinating facts, advice and studies specific to children who share DNA. It is intended to entertain and inform while, hopefully, spreading some of the happiness and love her twins bring her own family throughout the universe.

Under contract with Black Opal Books. No release date yet.

No Stranger Here

A novel by Lori Duffy Foster

Marilyn Dekker has no roots. Her parents moved constantly throughout her childhood, sometimes tearing her from bed in the middle of the night, and her husband’s work forced them to move with their own children every few years.

So when the opportunity comes to settle permanently among the lush hills, fresh -water creeks and quiet ponds of Northern Pennsylvania, she readily agrees. But when two strangers on ATVS nearly kill her, Marilyn learns she is no stranger in these parts. With her arrival, she has unknowingly awakened dangerous family secrets that people will kill to protect. Marilyn has a choice: She can escape, like her parents did and raise her children on the run; or she can unravel the mystery of her parents’ past, risking her own life and lives of her husband and children to end the cycle of fear.

Dead Man’s Eyes

A novel by Lori Duffy Foster

Lisa Jackson has done well for a single mom who got pregnant at 15. She is a reporter at a well-respected newspaper and her daughter is an honor student at the local high school. She has accomplished what she set out to do: provided her daughter with the kind of life she never had.

But all that changes when Lisa sees her daughter in the eyes of a dead man.

The cops call it a drug killing, but Lisa doesn’t believe it. She knows her ex-boyfriend Marty was no drug dealer even though she hadn’t seen him in 16 years. Lisa ignores warnings from her medical-examiner friend. She fails to heed barely veiled threats from the sheriff of a neighboring county. Instead, she risks her life and the lives of her daughter and their live-in nanny on a dangerous quest for answers.

The investigation leaves Lisa fighting for her family in a morbid, black market world she never knew existed. Along the way, she is forced to acknowledge her daughter’s other family and confront her own empty childhood. She learns that trust is complicated and that she, despite her cynical nature, has been blind. She trusted the wrong people and now she might have to pay with her life.

Set in Upstate New York in the early 1990s, Invisible Ink acknowledges the lines we draw between good and evil. But, in reality, those lines are meaningless. Evil knows no boundaries or loyalties. We draw in invisible ink.

Never Broken: A Lisa Jamison Mystery

A novel by Lori Duffy Foster

The near-corpse of a stranger had no idea where he’d been, how long he’d been there or who had kept him captive. But one thing intrigued journalist Lisa Jamison even more than his story: recent memories of a woman named Chandra Bower.

Seven years had passed since Chandra had disappeared from Seneca Springs without a trace. Police investigators still pulled her dental records whenever an unidentified body appeared, hoping to at least bring her family closure. Lisa still chased down leads from desperate family and friends, being careful to hide her investigations from an editor who thought she’d become obsessed with a woman who was clearly dead.

But this man had just seen her, sewing designer clothes in a dark, filthy basement with about forty other men and women under conditions unheard of in the United States since slavery was abolished in 1865. And the sweatshop workers all had one thing in common. They were black.

A split-second decision to help the man takes Lisa on a race against time. His captors want him back, there is evidence someone on the police force might be involved and the man knows that if he were recaptured, they would torture him until he revealed the names of the two people who helped him escape: Lisa Jamison and Chandra Bower.

Lisa promised her teenage daughter she would stay away from the dangerous stories ever since her job had nearly gotten them both killed two years before. But she no longer has a choice. She must keep the stranger hidden while she gathers enough evidence to turn the case over to city police or the FBI. At least three lives – her own, the stranger’s and Chandra’s – depend on it.

My first and favorite novel. Holding onto this one for revisions and for an editor who loves it as much as I do.

Spring Melt

A novel by Lori Duffy Foster

As a doctor’s wife in a thriving Adirondack Mountain village in the mid-1920s, Ella Devine appeared to have an ideal life. Her husband grew rich catering to ill New York City socialites who wanted to hide their TB diagnosis from their friends. Their marriage was devoid of emotion, but so was she. Raped at 9 years old and rejected by her mother, she had learned to quietly accept whatever life offered. All that changed when three men, best friends of her deceased father, were charged with the 19-year-old murder of the man who had raped her.

Spring Melt draws on the rich and fascinating history of the Adirondacks, where hikers who see only low hills and lush vegetation, fail to perceive the hidden dangers and lose their lives by stepping two feet off the trail. Spring Melt focuses on the trial of the three retired lumberjacks; Ella’s emergence from victimhood; revelations of corruption under the former sheriff; and the plight of innocent Native Americans who were pawns in the sheriff’s money game. The lawyers must contend with the overwhelming strength of the fraternal bond of lumberjacks, a bond that hinders both the prosecution and the defense. Since the late 1800s, the wilderness that is the Adirondacks has been both a frontier to be conquered only by the hardiest of humans and a play land for the wealthy.